best sources of copper are liver, oysters, shiitake mushrooms, pure chocolate not the stuff watered down with sugar and milk, and spirulina

 

For everything from anemia to headaches to allergies to having healthy bones and just feeling great all the time, copper is an incredibly important nutrient and this is how to know if you're getting enough.

How to manage your copper status to make sure you're getting enough, not too much, and fix any problems and make sure that whatever your solutions are that they're working.  So copper, when you do not have enough you can get anemia that looks just like iron deficiency anemia but isn't, or that looks just like B12 and folate deficiency anemia, but isn't.  In fact, you can get malabsorption of iron from copper deficiency that actually causes iron deficiency, and the problem might not be that you don't have enough iron in your diet, it might be that you're not getting enough copper in your diet to absorb the iron, so you could have anemia from that as well as the many other problems of iron deficiency itself.  You can have low white blood cells, especially in neutrophils; you can have high cholesterol; you could get osteoporosis because copper is needed to support your bones.  You could get histamine intolerance or a greater burden of allergies than you would otherwise have.  You could have poor pigmentation of your skin and hair and neurotransmitter imbalances, like low adrenaline or high serotonin that might leave you feeling like you're not your best.  So what do you do about this?

1:44. Well, the first thing is look at your diet and see whether the dietary pattern that you have is supporting getting enough copper.  The absolute best sources of copper are liver, oysters, shiitake mushrooms, pure chocolate not the stuff watered down with sugar and milk, and spirulina.  A tier below that of very good sources of copper are most shellfish besides oysters, remember oysters are the best, whole grains, legumes, and potatoes.  Diets that are low in these foods are likely to contribute to a copper deficiency, but soil variation is very large, and all these foods, if they are grown in low copper soil, could be much less likely to give you enough copper.  And if you're consuming--if you're not consuming enough of those foods and you are consuming foods from copper-deficient soils, then that makes you very predisposed to copper deficiency.  Zinc supplementation, especially over 45 mg a day and with a zinc-to-copper ratio greater than 15 to 1, can be a cause of copper deficiency.  Methylation can be a cause of copper deficiency, and I'll link in the description of this episode to my methylation resources.  

SOURCES THAT CAUSE COPPER DEFICIENCY

3:08. Other sources of copper deficiency that are not dietary in nature include the use of antacids, proton pump inhibitors, gastric bypass surgery, and any digestive problems that are focused on the upper part of the GI tract like the stomach and the upper part of the small intestine.  And although there's limited evidence for this, it seems to be the case that high doses of Vitamin C can impair copper absorption.  

COPPER TOXICITY?

On the other hand, there is copper toxicity in general from diet.  I do not believe copper toxicity is a concern.  If you are supplementing with copper over 10 mg, that could pose a potential risk of copper toxicity.  I think it's best to keep copper supplements under 10 mg,  preferably under 3 mg a day and it's always best to get your copper from food, and when you do you're benefiting by the fact that the copper is mixed with other minerals, especially zinc, which protects against copper toxicity.  It's extremely unlikely to get copper toxicity from food. There are high copper levels in certain water systems, but when they get to the point where they can cause copper toxicity usually drinking that water is going to make you nauseated and it's usually leaving blue colors all over the place.  If it's really bad, you can see the blue even coming out in your clothing; so usually you have a warning sign, and certainly using a water filter will generally protect you against too much copper coming from your water supply. 

COPPER TESTS 

4:51. The most important test of copper status is serum copper this can be supplemented with serum ceruloplasmin; they tend to go together.  And so you're usually not getting additional information by combining them. And serum copper tends to be more sensitive to deficiency, so you always want to at least get serum copper but it can be helpful to corroborate it with serum ceruloplasmin.  But always get serum copper give that the priority in general low serum copper and low serum ceruloplasmin indicated copper deficiency most of the time.  From what I've seen, I think you want to tend to be in the middle of the range because I have seen indications of copper deficiency when people are in the lower 20 or 30% of the range.  It's important to note a a couple limitations of these tests first estrogen increases serum ceruloplasmin and tends to increase serum copper as well and that means that there's going to be some fluctuation of copper levels with the menstrual cycle and copper levels are generally twice hi during pregnancy as they are for women who are not pregnant and using hormone replacement therapy estrogen and HRT can raise copper levels by 30 to 90%, and unfortunately there really isn't any clear research to develop a separate reference range for women experiencing high estrogen under these conditions, so what we can say is that if your copper levels are running a little high and you can explain it with estrogen you can probably dismiss it because it's normal.  It's probably all the more true in women than in men that you want to be at least towards the middle of the range for copper because if you're at the low and of the range and that might be close to deficiency that's all the more true if you would expect your estrogen levels to be bringing the copper up higher.

GENETIC PREDISPOSITION TO COPPER DEFICIENCY

There are two genetic disorders of copper metabolism Menkes Disease and Wilson's Disease